October 01, 2002

Deschooling: taking the school out of homeschool
by sabater

I live in New York City and I officially started homeschooling September 10, 2001. We saw from our roof what happened on the next day and like millions of New Yorkers, we put on hold many of our plans until, literally, the dust settled. With children, though, there is no waiting for playtime or friends or cool things to do. You have to keep on going no matter what.

As the months went by, I thought that the difficulties we were having with homeschooling were due to the post 9/11 stress everybody was going through. No matter what I did, I felt I was up against a wall. I would create lesson plans, plan projects, read about child literacy and research teaching techniques and all my son would say was: "Bo-o-ring"; "this is stOOpid"; or the ever popular, "I don't want you to be my teacher!" ?to which I would reply , "Me neither."

Yet, as I met with more homeschoolers, read more e-lists and participated in more homeschooling events, I realized something bigger was happening to my son and, especially to me. There were little things like both my kids eating better because, since my husband works from home, we get together for all meals. There were big things like the joy my kids have because they spend more time together. And then, there were the huge things like the decision my husband and I made in May to turn down our son's admittance to a new magnate public school. Something happened in between our insecurities and the school's letter of acceptance: We were deschooling.

I have 27 consecutive years of schooling starting with pre-K and ending with my days as a university adjunct professor in the NYC area. So when we started we did not homeschool but we home schooled. I did what comes naturally to me or, in other words, what is my automatic way of thinking, doing and even being. It backfired.

Nobody knows better about this automatic thinking than HEM's Peter Kowalke. Even though he was a radical unschooler, Peter is part of a generation of homeschoolers that were expected to attend college. For this reason, he has an interesting take on college: It has come to him as a surprise how college "schooling" has, to use his words, sucked him in. The moment of truth came when he felt confronted by his fiancée's unschooling college: "After just a few years in college, it feels as if I need to deschool! I catch myself trying to push the school way upon her; like in asking her to create a college plan even if she is unschooling. It is an interesting struggle going on inside me, one I never would have guessed would happen."

This is the conundrum of homeschooling: What starts as a decision about our children's education becomes, in effect, a statement about not only our lives but of how we are expected to live. School is the agent that helps define the "American Way of Life". To break with school is to break away from a doctrine, a system of values and ideas that we should believe in, unquestioning. And this is particularly true for minorities; for whom schools are the mythical gateway to equality.

I am a baby born out of the Civil Rights Movement. I am the product of a biracial Puerto Rican couple who actively supported all efforts for desegregation here in the United States; especially the schools. They believed schools can heal a nation and transform it. So you have to ensure all citizens have equal access to schools.

The problem is, "School" has reached biblical proportions in our culture. We may qualify it but we never, ever are supposed to question the validity of attending it. The faith that Americans have in the school system is so strong that, especially during the Civil Rights Movement, people went to great lengths, even at the risk of loss of life, to ensure that anyone would have access to it. Even today, the allure of School is so powerful that people will even uproot their lives and move to a different town or state just for the sake of being in a "good" school district.

To school is not just to comply with compulsory education laws. Schooling is one more way to live what Sandra Dodd calls a prepackaged life: "How many things do you do because you're supposed to, because your relatives and neighbors respect it, because it's easy and you don't have to think about it?" School gives us our friends and peers; our elders and role models; our time for learning and the time for doing everything else.

It is no wonder that many homeschoolers feel adrift the first few months if not years of homeschooling. We are not just deciding to teach our own. We are actually choosing to live outside a structure that is supposed to shape not only our minds but our lives. We feel adrift because we are deschooling. Our homeschooling practices are chipping away at the automatic way of being that schooling supports.

When deschooling starts and, just as with anything that suddenly is absent, we notice how much power schooling has had over our lives. So we go from anxiety to revelation every day and every hour; yet, the process may take months, even years, to unfold. The trick is to get there and many of us have done so in different ways.

To Betsy Braun, it came after her children just "hated" their homeschooling setup: "When I started to homeschool, I bought a school desk for each child and I lined them up in front of my chair and I intended to school them face to face that way. I drew up a regimented schedule and thought how it would be nice for there to be a school bell that alerted us as to when the next class started. I chose a 'classical education' because that's as close as I could get to what was rather familiar. They hated it." Judi Sassi, who was once a public high school teacher, says of their early homeschooling days: "Initially I tried to emulate the public school system in my home ... until I discovered it just didn't work. When you teach in a public school system, you tend to become a paper generator simply because you have to see where your students are and, I guess, prove that you're doing something."

To me, it came one day when my oldest son was "teaching" his little brother how to do something with the computer. Aidan was resistant and started screaming. Evan yelled back at him, "But I have to teach you". Right then and there I got what was happening. As quietly as possible I asked:

"Do you like it when I am teaching you something?"
To which he huffed, "No".
"So ? if Aidan were you and you were me, what would you say?"
"Stop teaching me?", he said with a smirk on his face.
"So what does "Evan" want now?"
"He wants to try it first and then ask for help if he needs it."
"And "I" need to walk away and let you do it, right?"
"Yeah."
"Show me how to walk away."
"You can do it like this (as he walks away) but only if I don't ask you for help."

Lisa Clark said succinctly what I understood that day: "My experience with homeschooling has been as much about my own education as it has been about my children's. I am constantly amazed at what I don't know". We all homeschool for many different reasons or just because we can. The bottom line is that we homeschool because we are willing to question one of the main aspect of the "prepackaged life". Through this questioning, radical changes happen, I believe, in us parents; for we are leading our children into their education.

Henry Lindner, who is unschooling his two daughters, considers himself "the poster boy for adult deschooling". He has spent the last 10 years studying History and Philosophy and basically "struggling to recover my natural curiosity and motivation." In a way, Henry has hit it over the head: you can take the kid out of school, but it is far more difficult to take the school out of the kid, especially if that kid is you. School lives in us as a set of automatic practice. To be mindful of these practices is to overcome the chaos of deschooling. As Anne Robertson says of her first year deschooling: "Understanding who my child is and why is the best lesson plan ever addressed to me."

So how can you tell if you are deschooling? As I can see from an informal survey I conducted, people go through three stages while deschooling. I'd like to think of them as the three Rs: Resist ,Regroup , and Research . There is no order for these to happen but they certainly seem to be part of people's deschooling experience.

Resistance is the stage in which children or parents are opposed to the idea of homeschooling or learning at all, not because they want to go back to school but because homeschooling is too much like school.

Regrouping , is about backing off and backing down from expectations and judgments. It is a time to play, to hang out and to reassess priorities. This is the decompression period a lot of homeschoolers talk about and which many homeschoolers believe should be one month for every year our kids attended school.

Research , comes along with resistance and regrouping: This is the time spent immersed in the homeschooling community, meeting and learning more about the different styles and experience.

Deschooling is a period of frustration, exhaustion and inquiry because it marks our transition from the prepackaged life of schooling to the uncharted world of homeschooling. As Catherine de Mauriac said to me, "In spite of the fact that we started in reaction to our perceptions of the inadequacies of our local district, now that we are in it, it would take wild horses to drag us out. It is a most amazing journey of discovery of ourselves, each other and the universe that we could not have even imagined the true character of the experience and can't completely conceive of where it will take us. It's not perfection, and mostly it's darn difficult. But what would we do in this life if we didn't take up a good challenge now and again?"

Deschooling brings a confidence that grows out of, not only rediscovering our children as individuals, but of a new knowledge of ourselves.This knowledge can bring the possibility of reveling in the joy of our own journeys. Staying mindful can help us determine which skills are a help or detriment to working with your children. That way, what makes us go into "automatic drive" can help us determine strategies for homeschooling. In the end, deschooling can help in opening our minds and our hearts; to create the spaces in which play, wonder and discovery can truly happen.

culturekitchen.com © 2002, Liza Sabater
This article first appeared in Home Education Magazine, Oct 2002

Posted by Liza in Article, Culture, Education, Health, Indy Learning, Parenting
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1) | Technorati Cosmos

Trackbacks

Trackback for this post:
http://www.culturekitchen.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1

The following blogs make reference to this post :

» BlogHer, terror and the business of compassion from BlogSheroes / BlogHer

Cross-posted from c u l t u r e k i t c h e n: BlogHer, terror and the business of compassion

I am going into BlogHer withdrawal. I have also been chewing on more posts about BlogH

[More...]

Found inAugust 16, 2005 02:50 PM

Say it loud, say it proud!